Waiting for warmer days to come

Another timely reflection by Fr Jason Murphy in his popular column Let the busy world be hushed...

She sits at the window watching for the springtime, longing for the greening of the hedges along the laneway that once she walked with ease of foot from the turn at Ballyhaise Station to the cross at Killybandrick. She waits patiently, watching on the Hawthorn to give way to the blooming of the May bush, bringing hope of warmer days in the summer that has yet to come. She has watched for many a springtime, as she approaches her 104th year, over a century delighting in the primrose and the wild garlic as it blooms along the banks. Tall chesnuts stand aloft sheltering the passerby from the last of the April showers in the place where she grew as a girl along the narrow road to Ballyhaise on the far side of Butlersbridge, in the townland of Aughadrumagullion.

She never says it was easy growing as a child in those early years of the Free State, but then again she never complains, ‘hard work never killed anyone’ she reminds. A vase of red tulips adorn her window, a gift from a neighbour’s garden and another of tall blue camassias picked by her daughter who comes to visit.

We talk on earthly things, as we sit together looking to the laneway, her daughter, her mother and I, as if gazing into a television set, our eyes fixed on the beauty of the everyday that spans out through the window before us. She has lived in this house for over 70s years, but a third of its history, since first she came as the new Mrs Hayes in by the Post Office and the Church that stand along the road at Cloverhill when the steam train still passed by that way.

A gentle breeze blows through the opened window as she delights in its passing by, such simple and ordinary things that she finds pleasure in as her son catches her gaze as he turns in from the lane beneath the tall sycamore tree. ‘I seen the first of the swallows swooping around the sheds on the back street without’ as he turns the bakelite knob on the door and joins us in the front room. Sheds where once she reared twelve sows and milked a herd of cows by hand now stand empty of cattle where only the swallows make their home and rear their brood, as they have done in all the time she has lived here.

Oh how she yearned to see but one swallow swooping by her window catching a damselfly in mid-flight, the foretelling of a hundred summers since, as a little girl, she waited on the swallows to summon the school holidays and those unending days of June and July. Her daughter recounts a story taught by the Master in old Keeny school of the boy who waited on the swallows each and every year, as she draws from the attic of her memory the story of ‘Eoineen of the Birds’, a sad tale that brought tears to her eyes as a little girl. Eoineen waited on the swallows on the rock at the foot of the tall ash tree to tell him of a world where the summer never ends, a place of unending light and peace. It is to there that, after the summer, the swallows call him forth, to journey with them onwards to this place where the sun hardly sets. And it is to this place she longs to journey onward as she sits looking to the road, this place in her mind’s eye where the May bush always blooms.

Her work on earth is almost done as she waits patiently, praying, for a life unending, for her faith in God is sure, a God that has seen her through the rigours of life for these hundred years and more, a God whom she always turned to each and every day. She thanks the Lord, continuously, her hands joined firmly in prayer, that she has been led into the shade of life so safely with ‘neither pain nor ache’.

For the years, though many in number, have passed so quickly by, like swallows, one by one, swooping out from under the eaves of the barn. And so she looks to the laneway to watch for the greening of the hedges and the warmer days to come, delighting in the moments that the Lord grants in her waiting for the summer, that with the blossoming of the May bush and the coming of the swallows, will for each of us most surely come.

Read more: Let the Busy World be Hushed